Less Is More. More Is More.

Esquire invited minimalist icon Richard Meier and maximalist superstar Takashi Murakamito to argue their cases and then we photographed some of the world's top minimalists and maximalists in clothes that speak their language.

Aug 18, 2008

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Two guys walk into a bar. One's dressed like a priest in mourning. The other's dressed like Elton John on speed. How can each claim to be the best-dressed man in the room? Because in matters of style and design, there will always be champions of simplicity (minimalists) and champions of excess (maximalists). Esquire invited two such champions -- minimalist icon Richard Meier and maximalist superstar Takashi Murakami -- to argue their cases and then, using their words and works as guidance, we photographed some of the world's top minimalists and maximalists in clothes that speak their language. Let the debate begin.

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Nigel Parry

Masamichi Katayama, Interior Designer

If retail stores are the cathedrals of 21st century culture, the founder of Tokyo-based Wonderwall design studio is responsible for the hallowedest of grounds. Katayama has built cutting-edge interiors for A Bathing Ape, Uniqlo, Sony, and Marc Jacobs -- think clothes on conveyer belts and other sci-fi flourishes -- and his Pop-inflected aesthetic pulses with a forward-looking energy. "The future should be about not having restrictions on potentialities. At least that is what I try to practice, and I believe that the responsibility of every creator should be about broadening the possibilities in design."

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Nigel Parry

André Balazs, Hotelier

"To get minimalism right, you have to work very, very hard or the result can be unattractive, cold, or even impersonal," says the owner of the Standard hotels in Los Angeles and Miami as well as New York's Mercer hotel. And Balazs gets it right, every time, by ensuring his properties have an airy, streamlined aesthetic--nothing fussy but no expense spared. Look for a gleaming new Standard in New York in 2009.

His breakthrough film with Western audiences, 1999's Audition, offered a glimpse of male-female relations that makes Fatal Attraction look like Pretty Woman, and with more than sixty films to his name, he's shown a remarkable willingness to explore the extremes of what-if scenarios. The man's imagination simply knows no limits -- what's more maximalist than that?

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Nigel Parry

Masamichi Udagawa, Product Designer

The Japanese cofounder of New York's Antenna Design has applied a rigorous austerity to commissions as varied and commonplace as Bloomberg's redesigned data terminals, JetBlue's self-service kiosks, and more than three thousand subway cars. "Minimum material, minimum effort, minimal calamities--that is what minimalism means to me."

In today's global marketplace, the most valuable currency isn't the Euro or Yen -- it's Cool. Shiny and pure, it's worth twice its weight in gold, and no one has greater reserves of it than Nigo. The creative force behind clothing lines like A Bathing Ape and Billionaire Boys Club outfits the world's aspirational class in sportswear that attract fans from his native Tokyo to Topeka. His creations are colorful and comfortable, but more importantly, they're Cool incarnate.

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Nigel Parry

Tobias Wong, Product Designer

A crystal chandelier dipped in industrial rubber. A McDonald's coffee stirrer transformed into a golden coke spoon. Twenty-four-karat- gold pills intended for ingestion and, uh, passage. With each new product, Wong subverts popular attitudes about conspicuous consumption with provocative wit and a prankster's love for trouble. "People want bang for their buck, which I guess makes me the bang."

He honed his aesthetic at the altar of Zen deities like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and whether Allen is streamlining the contours of Johnson & Johnson's iconic first-aid kit or creating ghostly white hands that act as coat holders or vases, he keeps those titans in mind. "I have a list of criteria when I'm designing. The first is always, 'Would I buy it?' But later, it's always, 'Would Donald Judd buy it?' "

Admit it: You wish you knew how he did it, right? Not since Copperfield abracadabra'd the Great Wall has the world seen feats so audacious and awesomely cheesy as Blaine's. He's been buried alive for seven days. He's stood atop a ninety-foot-high pillar for almost thirty-five hours. He's escaped from a spinning gyroscope after fifty-two hours in motion. "In spectacle I can communicate desires and fears without saying a word." And how.

This founder of landscape-design firm Field Operations is the mastermind behind the lush simplicity of New York's High Line and Fresh Kills parks. "There is a real art in trying to produce the maximum effects with minimal means, but that's what's required to create new sets of experience, new sets of perception, and new types of space for new forms of socialization."

England's most famous chef--or its most profane, at least--brings his legendary theatrics and Michelin-starred cuisine to America as host of NBC's upcoming The Chopping Block. "I've always said more is more and less is less. If you are going to serve something with caviar, then be generous with the caviar. I might not be able to eat it all, but I want to see it all."

Associate partners at Richard Meier & Partners and heirs to the great man's kingdom, these three (along with partner Michael Palladino, not pictured) will carry Meier's minimalist vision well into the twenty-first century. First up: two monumental projects--the East River Master Plan and the SoMa Newark Master Plan--that will transform the landscapes of New York and its troubled New Jersey sister city.

His two New York hotels, the Night and the Dream, both resemble sets from Bollywood epics, and with six more just like them on the way around the world, Chatwal roots his love for over-the-top design in the cinema of his folks' native India. "Bollywood films are outrageous, and that's exactly what we're trying to do with our hotels. We're trying to push everyone's imagination."

The Boat, the debut collection of short stories from this Vietnamese-Australian writer, brought critics to the brink of climax with its spare prose and emotional nuance. "I wouldn't call myself a minimalist in the Raymond Carver sense--I use more adverbs than he did--but I'm guided by what you'd call negative relief: what details to hide, what images and metaphors to exclude, what people don't say. That's real life, isn't it?"

Born in St. Petersburg but now as American as a vodka tonic, the author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan lives to skewer and satirize the excesses of global culture. "Russia still inspires me every day, and it's a very maximalist country. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky--they didn't just swallow little pieces of society. They ate the entire world. My next book, it's a comedy about the collapse of the United States, and it's not just a snapshot. It's a gigantic romp."

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Nigel Parry

Robert and Granger Moorhead, Architectural And Industrial Designers

"No wasted gestures." That's how Granger (right), brother number one of multidisciplinary design firm Moorhead & Moorhead, describes their minimalist approach to furniture and building. And this is how Robert, brother number two, describes their collaborative process: "We know we're stuck with each other. At the end of the day, we're still brothers, no matter how much it looks like we want to kill each other."

With inspirations as diverse as his childhood growing up in the Azores and the creepy parts of The Matrix, the creative director of Site Specific Design has unleashed an army of oversized, insect-inspired furniture on the world. "Maybe it's really refined maximalism, or maybe it's just over-the-top minimalism. [Beat.] Or maybe it's just a seven-foot-tall bug-looking lamp. Does it really matter?"

Chef and co-owner of Blue Hill restaurant in New York and champion of the farm-to-table movement, Barber draws a distinction between food that is simple and food that just looks it. "To cook a great asparagus or roast a leg of lamb and to present it simply doesn't mean that the process behind it doesn't have a tremendous amount of thought and complexity. It also doesn't mean that it will taste any less amazing."

Based in New York, Rashid is a coprincipal of Asymptote, the architecture firm behind the HydraPier Pavilion in the Netherlands, the Penang Global City Center in Malaysia, and other gravity-defying exercises in twenty-first-century chutzpah. "The world forces that circulate in our daily lives are much more complex than what anyone can put into a little white box."

To hear the founder of Readymade Projects tell it, there are two kinds of people in this world: "Those who like a lot of color and those who don't." And Burks, to say the least, is punch-drunk on ROYGBIV, with his designs for clients like Cappellini and Missoni offering eye candy in shocking doses. "I love color. I've always loved color, and my work is about finding the right moment to be expressive with it. And then I go for it."

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